Gravity is a property of spacetime. | Photo Credit: Johnson Martin/Unsplash A: For a long time, people wondered what makes the planets go around the sun and why anything thrown up comes down. The English scientist Isaac Newton probed the origins of this mysterious force and came up with the laws of gravitation. According to … Read more
Today, almost every keyboard we use — whether it’s on your personal computer or phone — follows the QWERTY layout. But did you know this arrangement wasn’t the obvious choice when typewriters were first invented? The origins of the typewriter The story of the QWERTY layout begins with the invention of the mechanical typewriter in … Read more
Shubhanshu Shukla | Photo Credit: Visveswaran V Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla of the Indian Air Force is set to be the first Indian in over four decades to travel to space and board the International Space Station (ISS), with liftoff scheduled for June 11 as part of Axiom Space’s Ax-4 mission. The flight, launching from … Read more
The Axiom-4 mission, carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station, has been postponed to June 11 due to weather conditions. | Photo Credit: JOE RAEDLE Even as the launch of Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla’s mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has once again been postponed, agencies associated with launch activities are … Read more
Manzoor, U., Mujica Roncery, L., Raabe, D. et al, ‘Sustainable nickel enabled by hydrogen-based reduction’, Nature 641, 365–373 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08901-7 Nickel powers everything, from gadgets to green technologies. But getting it currently involves a far from green, in fact, a dirty process. However, a new study has revealed what its authors have said is a … Read more
The team focused on what the BBX32 gene does in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Representative photo. | Photo Credit: Markus Spiske/Unsplash Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, have found that a single protein helps plants time their first step from darkness into light. When a seed sprouts in … Read more
The story of how heeng came to be successfully cultivated in India
As per the earlier plan, the crew was scheduled to dock with the space station on June 11 at approximately 12:30 p.m. ET. Photo: X/@SpaceX The launch of Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla’s mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has once again been postponed. The Axiom-4 Mission to the ISS, which was scheduled on … Read more
The strawberry supermoon rises behind the village of Imerovigli on Sandorini’s caldera, in Greece’s Cyclades islands, on June 14, 2022. | Photo Credit: Petros Giannakouris The Strawberry Moon, traditionally named after the strawberry harvest season in North America, will peak at 3:44 a.m. EDT on June 11, 2025, equivalent to 1:14 p.m. IST. Although the full phase … Read more
A pair of cryo-electron microscopes at the University of Leeds. | Photo Credit: Hiramano92 (CC BY-SA) Scientists use a powerful technique called cryo-electron microscopy to see the 3D shapes of biological molecules, but it normally needs the molecules to be extremely concentrated in a sample first. But for rare molecules this is hard to achieve. … Read more